This article is a resource for anyone who has signed up for Mindful in May 2018 ( and equally applies to any other similar self-care challenge). It outlines 8 key steps for you to consider to set yourself up for success.
I was preparing this “Setting yourself up for success” handout to provide at a launch of Mindful in May at corporate client in Melbourne this week and it struck me that this information might be useful to a broader audience involved in Mindful in May- so here it is hopefully with a gem or two for you to get the most out of this challenge.(NB. It equally applies to any new self-care program that you might be considering too)
1. Be clear about what you are committing to upfront – Setting an Intention and Goals
I recommend setting an intention for the whole month and a goal for each week. Intentions are more about deciding ‘who’ you want to be and ‘how’ you want to show up, for example: your intention might be to keep showing up with the practice even when you don’t feel like it / or your intention might be to act with self-compassion throughout this experience.
Goals are about what you want to ‘do’ or accomplish. You might be better to start small. For example, maybe you set a goal for the first week to do four out of seven days and then review at the end of the week. If you end up doing it each day, then that’s a bonus. Repeat this each week. Review your intention and goals each week and refine so it feels right for you.
2. Decide on a regular time to do the practice.
Block it out in your calendar just as you would any other meeting. This is time for you to be with you. Block out half an hour so you have time to arrive get set up and space at the end to reflect or journal.
3. Attach it to an existing habit.
For example, if you get up each morning and the first thing you do is make a cup of tea, add your new step ‘do my meditation’ right before that one. So now you get up and sit in a chair in the lounge room and do your meditation, then have your cup of tea. Or in the evening, this time linking the new habit (the daily meditation) to cleaning your teeth, for example. (Charles Duhrigg’s book The Power of Habits is a great read on this topic.)
4. Set up the physical environment.
Where will you do your practice? Setting it up in the same location is the best way to establish a habit. What do you need to be supremely comfortable? A chair? Cushions? A blanket? A sign on the door to let others know not to interrupt is a great idea. What other distractions need to be removed from the space? If you are doing it at home let your family/kids know the what and how long you will be. (Pets and kids will be drawn to you when you meditate as they love how it feels).
5. Make sure your technology is working.
So you’ve set your intention and goals, your feeling mentally prepared and physically prepared and then your technology doesn’t work! Get your technology sorted ahead of time – what device will you use? Check that it is working ahead of time. Make sure your calls, messages and any other beeps and blips can be turned off during your practice. I recall running a group session last year for mindful in may and my computer froze all together five minutes into the meditation! It was not ideal. Please avoid that for yourself!
6. Holding yourself to account.
Decide if this is a solo adventure for you or if you would benefit from a buddy or buddies to share the experience with and help hold each to account. It’s your choice – make a conscious choice and set your self up with the support that you know that you need. If you do decide the buddy option decide whether you will meet each day to do the challenge (or not) but be sure to then schedule a weekly check in time to share your experience and to re-visit and refine your goals and intentions.
7. Keep a journal
Buy yourself a cheap notebook, nothing fancy and at the end of each 10 min session, take a few moments to reflect on how you felt before the session, how you feel now, how you found the practice today, what you noticed in your body and any other observations.
8. Sharing the love.
During the challenge share with others (your family, friends work colleagues) how you are finding the experience, what you are learning, which teachers are most inspiring etc. The world will be a better place when more and more people start to prioritise their own self-care needs. Mindfulness is a great way to begin that journey. If your kids are keen to get involved – that is fantastic – as a mother of three teenage daughters, I know more than ever how much kids need to add this skill to their ‘life toolkit’ too. In terms of the best way to approach, this I recommend still doing your practice AND then making a separate time to repeat one or more of the experiences that you have had with your child/children. (An important part of this process is this is about you claiming your own self-care space so its important to keep that healthy boundary).
Congratulations on taking this journey to take better care of you. I would love to hear how you go!
Has this been helpful? Are you interested in something more?
Perhaps you are needing an overall wellbeing health check? You might like to consider the completion of a Global Leadership Wellbeing Survey (GLWS) . Designed for senior leaders, this survey will help you understand your state of wellbeing at work and at home and is supported through a debrief and development coaching conversation to help you establish a sustainable self-care rhythm and show up as a better version of you. An eight week Wellbeing Assessment and Development Program (WADP) is also available for senior leadership teams to shift the dial on wellbeing and performance to drive cultural change.
This post outlines our 5S Leadership Self-Care Model focusing on the practice of ‘selfcare’ to bring yourself out of your head and into your body, connecting more with ‘feeling and being’ and reconnecting with what matters to you. The 5S Leadership Self-Care model provides a roadmap to explore and experiment with establishing or refining the practice of self-care to restore wellbeing and help you to find a sustainable self-care rhythm that works for you.
Continuing on the theme of my last post about being stuck on the ‘thinking and doing’ treadmill, this time I want to outline our 5S Leadership Self-Care Model.
Self-care refers to the practices, habits and routines that we engage in on a regular basis to reduce stress and maintain and enhance our short- and longer-term health and well-being (social, emotional, physical, psychological). Optimal wellbeing and high levels of personal resilience are not possible without an intentional focus on self-care. Source
- It doesn’t come easily for most people.
- Optimal wellbeing* isn’t possible without self-care.
- Wellbeing is one of the outcomes of the practice of self-care.
- Your ‘sustainable self-care’ needs and practices will be unique for you
- Self-care is a choice that you make. It starts with you.
- It’s a practice – like learning a new skill, it takes time and commitment
*“Wellbeing is so much more than the absence of illness. It implies flourishing, thriving, being fully alive. balanced and calm & contented and at ease with life.” – GLWS
5S Leadership Self-Care Model
1.Space
Carve out the space in work and life to focus on your personal development. In just the same way that you schedule meetings with others, schedule ‘personal development/self-care’ ‘meetings with yourself’ in your calendar.
Give these ‘appointments’ the same priority you would if they were meetings, which may involve setting some healthy boundaries. You might need to say ‘no’ to some requests or things that feel like ‘shoulds’. You may need to more assertively express your needs to your partner, colleagues or team. It may require taking yourself away, perhaps booking into a retreat or a place in the country for a couple of days by yourself. During these personal development sessions, turn off your phone, find an inviting location where you won’t be interrupted, remove all distractions and show up fully by yourself for yourself.
Creating space is where it all begins. It allows the external ‘noise’ of life to quieten down enough so that you can hear your own breath and feel your own heartbeat.
This post outlines a personal story as a great example of the need to carve out pockets of space in our lives and/or moments to take a balcony perspective. Unless we do that, it can be difficult to see what is right under our nose.
I choose to let go – Why we need space to reflect
2. Stillness
Within the space you have carved out, welcome stillness. You may experience some resistance and an urge to be distracted away from stillness – that’s normal. Stay with it. You can use some of the tips in these two previous posts to begin to notice your breath, quieten your mind, etc.
7 ways to access deeper levels of consciousness
Stuck-on the doing treadmill. This might-help
The idea here is to shift away from your racing thoughts and begin to access how you are feeling and what you are noticing in your body. Given the pace at which most of us operate, this definitely requires a transition of some sort, so be kind to yourself and keep it short at first – even five minutes is a great place to start. It’s only through stillness that we can get beyond the mental chatter that doesn’t serve us and bring our focus and attention back to the things that really matter.
3.Self- expression
Whether it is by writing, singing, drawing, sharing openly and honestly with a trusted other or by some other means, you need to be expressing how you are feeling. When we express how we are feeling and what is happening for us, we learn about ourselves and the world around us. The very act of expressing how we are feeling helps energy stuck within us to move through us, enabling us to reflect. It helps us gain clarity about where to next place our energy and attention. It strengthens our connection to self and, when we share openly with a trusted other, it builds connection.
There are so many possible ways of expressing how you are feeling, but here are a three examples:
Start a Journal. One of the most time-honoured, simplest and most powerful ways of capturing your thoughts and feelings. Set a time each day to write in your journal. Until it becomes a habit in its own right, it’s a good idea to attach your journal time to an existing habit, for instance while having your morning coffee.
Your task is to simply write about anything that wants to be written about. Just get out of the way of yourself, ignore the internal critic and put pen to paper. Remember that you’re only writing for yourself. You may write about how you are feeling or what is present for you. Reflect on what is going well for you and explore anything that you have been triggered by. Anything that has an emotional charge for us is a gift – if we can take the time to understand why it has that charge. Writing helps us to open different perspectives. It clears the mind and opens the heart.
One way to get started, or change things up, might be to try the Morning Pages practice as outlined by Julia Cameron.
I use a cheap A4 notebook for my journal as I feel freer just to write without having to produce a work of art. I rarely ever read my journal again – it’s about a download and a tool to process and make sense of what’s happening in life rather than recording my life.
New Experiences. Seek out different people, places and experiences, bringing an attitude of curiosity into all that you do. Our senses are an important way of connecting our external experiences with our internal world of ‘feeling and being’, and new experiences bring our senses to life. If you’ve never tried art, perhaps now’s the time.
Start close to home. Expression doesn’t always need to be in words. Why not trying having a long-held hug with someone that you love. Count to 20 seconds; you can’t help but melt into each other. It’s magic.
Self – expression goes hand in hand with the first of our Leadership Super Power practices – Reflection. These posts offer some great tips and reflective questions that can kick-start your process of self-expression:
Reflective practice: a leadership super power
Making reflective practice a reality – no matter how busy you are!
4. Self-compassion
Self-compassion is a measurable trait. In 2003 no-one had defined or measured it. In 2017 there were 1340 studies on self-compassion. Self-compassion is strongly linked to wellbeing.’ Source: Neff 2018
Self – compassion is about learning to becoming your own best friend. This is about turning the compassion that you undoubtedly make readily available for others into watering and nourishing yourself. Kristin Neff, is world expert on self-compassion. Part of what she offers in her work is a radical shift to ‘relate to self’ in new ways.
Kristin defines self-compassion as:
- being a good friend to yourself
- treating yourself the way you would treat a good friend; and
- holding pain with love.
The first step is develop self compassion is to learn about self-compassion. This blog post –“Are you being a good friend to yourself” is a great place to start.
5. Support
Find the right support for you. It may be friends, your manager, a leadership development workshop or program. It’s often challenging to go this alone and having someone to ‘walk’ alongside you can accelerate the process. Engage an leadership coach if you feel you would benefit from non-biased, professional support to help you reach your self-care goals and to hold you to account. Or if you are a senior woman you might be interested in Cultivating Well 1:1 Coaching Program.
Summary
By taking committed action to the elements that make up our Leadership Self-Care Model you will be taking a major leap forward with your own self-care.
To commit to self-care is to value yourself, your relationships, your professional work. That’s simply too important to ignore.
Please reach out if we can help.
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Needing an overall wellbeing health check? You might like to consider the completion of a Global Leadership Wellbeing Survey (GLWS) . Designed for senior leaders, this survey will help you understand your state of wellbeing at work and at home and is supported through a debrief and development coaching conversation. It can be a great way of beginning your journey towards greater self-care and provide key inputs to help you establish a sustainable self-care rhythm. Contact us for details.
In a previous post Mastering ‘thinking and doing’ AND ‘feeling and being’, I discussed how out of balance we have become as leaders, spending too much time ‘thinking and doing’ at the expense of ‘feeling and being’. I argued that this is affecting us at a physiological and behavioural level, with flow on effects on our relationships, connection, life and leadership.
Living life solely from our heads – thinking and doing – and only stopping when we fall exhausted into bed each night keeps us stuck on the ‘doing’ treadmill. We wake up and do it all again. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. It’s exhausting. And it’s not sustainable.
Sound familiar to you or someone you know?
What are some of the ways this is impacting your/their lives?
I know about this first hand because, as I mentioned in that previous post, ‘thinking and doing’ was all I knew really for the first 36 years of my life. I was surviving but not thriving. It took illness and injury for me to finally wake up and make a change. I learned the hard way.
But you don’t need to do it the hard way. I wanted to share what I now know in the hope that you can circumvent the avalanche that came my way and make a conscious choice to make positive change now. Today, I mean. Got it? (Or if not you, is there someone else that you are concerned about who needs to read this?)
Here is what I know:
- Only you can be your own rescue – no one else. It is up to you.
- You have to acknowledge what is currently not working and how it is keeping you from who and how you want to be. You know that little nagging voice inside you that has been telling you that something needs to change? Make a conscious choice to listen to it. (It wants the best for you).
- Set a clear intention and take committed action.
- Small simple steps are the best way to start. There’s no need to rush out and join the gym or make some other big investment or decision. Begin with small, simple steps.
Examples of simple steps:
- Simple breathing for 2 to 5 minutes, morning and night. Put a timer on, close your eyes and place your hands comfortably on your lap. Bring your attention to your breathing. Noticing our breath connects us back to our body. When did you last consciously breathe?
- Listen to some relaxing music for 5 to 10 minutes before you go to bed. Give your body some simple stretches as you listen to the music or simply close your eyes and let the music carry you away. What is some of your favourite music to relax to? Create a relaxing music playlist or get a ready made one on Spotify or Apple Music.I’ve included a couple of my favourites here:
- Start (or return to) a short meditation practice:
- My Yoga Nidra meditation teacher John Vosler has a free 10-minute guided meditation that you can access here.
- There are many great apps if you want to start or return to a meditation practice. Try out Oak and begin to grow your own tree. Or Smiling Mind is another popular app.
- Take your shoes off and go and stand on the earth, the sand, the grass. Close your eyes and just spend time noticing your feet on the ground, the sounds around you and the air on your skin.
5. Attach a new habit to an existing habit. For example, if you get up each morning and the first thing you do is make a cup of tea, add a new ‘simple step’ right before that one. So now you get up and sit in a chair in the loungeroom and notice your breath for five mins, then have your cup of tea. Do the same in the evening, this time linking the new habit to cleaning your teeth, for example. (Charles Duhrigg’s book The Power of Habits is a great read on this topic.)
In my next post, I will outline my five ‘s’ model – great practices and experiences that you can add to your toolkit to bring you out of your head and into your body, connecting more with ‘feeling and being’.